


Suddenly Seymour

by LetaDarnell



Category: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 02:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6592780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LetaDarnell/pseuds/LetaDarnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is weird.  And weirdly dark.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is weird. And weirdly dark.

“You don’t know?” Paine asked. “How can you not know? You were right there!”

  
“No, I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Yuna said.

  
“That’s what I said,” Paine said.

  
“No, that’s what I said.”

  
“Exactly,” Paine said.

  
“No, I mean that’s what I said.”

  
“I know, you said you didn’t know,” Paine said.

  
“Exactly,” Yuna said.

  
“Well, how can you not know? I mean, you were—“

  
“No, I SAID that.”

  
“Exactly.”

  
“My head hurts,” Rikku said.

  
“No, Paine, I said ‘I don’t know.’”

  
Brother yawned.

  
“That’s what I said.”

  
“Is this still the same argument?” Buddy asked.

  
“You want me to start over?” Yuna asked.

  
“Just tell me what you told him!” Paine said.

  
“It,” Buddy said.

  
“How would you know?” Brother asked.

  
Rikku shook her head.

  
“I told her that I didn’t know,” Yuna said.

  
“Oh, then why didn’t you say that!” Paine said.

  
Their audience let out a collective sigh. They were getting bored. For having saved the world from an evil machina hidden away by the church, this was one of the most anti-climactic resolutions ever.

  
“Do fayth take rain checks?” Paine asked.

  
“How should I know?”

  
“You saved them twice!” Paine said.

  
“This is why I’m an atheist,” Rikku muttered. The rest of the Al Behd nodded. “Can we start over?”

  
Everyone sighed. Some in relief, some in frustration.

  
“What didn’t you understand?” Yuna asked.

  
“Everything,” Rikku said.

  
“Everything everything?” Paine asked.

  
“No, just the last five minutes everything,” Rikku said.

  
“When did things stop having short explanations?” Buddy asked.

  
“When did they stop having explanations at all?” Brother asked. “I’m bored.”

  
“I’m getting there,” Yuna said.

  
“Getting where?” Brother asked.

  
“Just start over,” Paine said.

  
“Okay,” Yuna said. “From where?”

  
Everyone groaned.

  
“Now it’s everything everything,” Rikku said. “My head hurts.”

  
Everyone else agreed.

  
“Okay, we beat Vegnagun right?” Yuna asked. Finally she was back in familiar territory. It was far to difficult to help someone in a crisis when you had to work on both ends of the conversation, as well as the middle, which she seemed to have presumed already happened. “Then there was the fayth, right?”

  
“Singular or plural?” Paine asked.

“Just one,” Yuna said. “Then she said if I wanted Tidus—“

“Whoa, where’d he come from?” Paine asked.

  
“The fayth made him. Then she—“

  
“No, I mean, when did Tidus get into the conversation.”

  
“He wasn’t.”

  
“Owwie,” Rikku complained, holding her head. Paine was thinking the girl would have a better time with calculus.

  
“Why were you talking about Tidus in the first place?” Paine asked slowly through gritted teeth.

  
“The fayth asked if I wanted him back,” Yuna answered. She was the only one not bothered by this. What bothered her was that it bothered others for no reason she could see. “I told you?”

  
“When?” Paine asked.

  
“When did it happen or when did I mention it?”

  
“Never mind,” Paine said, holding her head. “So what happens if you want Tidus back?”

  
“We have to take care of him.”

  
“Him who?” Buddy asked. Flying through hail and hitting the errant bird was better than this. And that was when Brother was driving.

  
“Tidus?” Rikku asked. Rikku was actually smarter than most people thought. Once you got to know her, you realized a lot of Al Behd’s had similar circular logic. She was merely more forward, more energetic, and a lot more bouncy than most, which somehow made people think that was connected with her mental processes, similar to thinking a man with a limp is deaf.

  
“No, Seymour,” Yuna said. “I told you, the fayth was his—used to—was formerly—“

  
“Something like that,” Paine summed up, hoping to hear the other half the sentence before it got dark.

  
“She was his mom.”

  
“That guy has connections everywhere,” Buddy said.

  
Brother fell over. He liked looking at Yuna, but the conversation was a strain on his simple mentality. Whatever happened to ‘let’s shoot it’ or ‘I have a plan involving a new skirt?’

  
“So, you spent two hours telling us we have to babysit some idiot who misses his mommy?”

  
“Well… yeah… but when you say it makes me sound stupid.”

  
Buddy sighed. He really wanted to get to the end of this. It was hard being the voice of maturity if you left in the middle of the conversation, which was starting to seem like a verbal surreal picture with doorways that lead to upside-down staircases.

  
“I thought he was dead,” Rikku said, displaying her perfect logic, which only sometimes met with common sense, only by colliding headfirst into it.

  
“He was dead,” Paine said.

  
“He is dead,” Yuna corrected.

  
“Well, that makes that part simpler,” Buddy said. He was actually amazed They had gotten through three sentences without having to backtrack to half-an hour ago.  
“Couldn’t you just say you were sorry?” Paine asked.

  
“Paine, we can’t just give him a present and apologize for hitting him on the head!”

  
“Hit who?” Rikku asked.

  
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Paine complained.

  
“I volunteer!” Brother said, still lying on the floor.

  
“No one’s doing that,” Buddy said.

  
“No one’s doing anything,” Paine said. “Why do we have to take care of some suicidal fruitcake?”

  
“I don’t like fruitcake.”

  
“And we’re off to a wonderful start,” Paine muttered.

  
“I started hours ago,” Yuna said.

  
“And yet, you haven’t finished,” Paine said.

  
“Where was I?” Yuna asked.

  
Everyone turned toward a strange thumping sound, only to find that it was brother, banging his head on the floor. Most found themselves quite envious at this.  
“Well, they’re the fayth and they have Tidus, first,” Yuna said. “ And apparently there’s something about Guado magic, which was complicated, but important.”

  
“Let’s just stick with that explanation for now,” Paine said.

  
“What’s this have to do with us?” Buddy asked.

  
“Well, the farplane is getting ruined,” Yuna said, not really caring herself.

  
“We don’t have to worry about that for decades,” Paine said.

  
“Actually, y’know how there were flowers in one part and everything else was just rocks? There used to be more of those.”

  
“Rocks? Paine asked.

  
“Flowers?” Rikku asked.

  
“Yeah,” Yuna said, confusing her cousin. Rikku wasn’t used to being right about things people said were complicated. “And then there was something about a line of rulers keeping it that way, and keeping the fiends down.”

  
“He’s picking all the flowers?” Rikku asked, the paused. “Down where?”

  
Everyone sighed. The echo sighed.

  
In Paine’s opinion things should be fixed by hitting people on the head, sometimes both parties because they refuse to smarten up. This situation appeared to be completely hit-less and it angered her.

  
In Rikku’s opinion, there were bad things, good things, and broken things. Good things were good, bad things were hit or they exploded, broken things were fixed and then became good things. She wasn’t sure if this was bad or broken, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t good.

  
Yuna thought everyone was nice until they did something bad, then they weren’t good anymore and had to be dealt with—often permanently. She didn’t know the spelling of ‘psychology’ or ‘trauma,’ let alone the meaning or significance.

  
Buddy really had no idea what to do with world-threatening situations, he just believed that there are some people who shouldn’t be allowed to speak in certain situations. The problem was, the more he worked with the Gullwings, the more people he thought should be silent. Unfortunately, these people were the ones with the important things to say.

  
“I don’t know,” someone said. Everyone agreed.


	2. Chapter 2

The problem with Yuna was that she wasn’t really a people-person. A people-person can still smile and go ‘oh, well,’ to someone who doesn’t agree with them. Yuna had happily made a vendetta against half of Spira, which was satisfied when she became famous and got nearly everything she wanted. Yuna was merely a ‘people-who-like-me-person.’

  
Paine was a ‘people-I-can-ignore-person.’ She was good at ignoring people. If, for some reason, she couldn’t ignore them, she hit them on the head until they were unconscious and ignored them. It was when they regained consciousness that gave her problems.

  
Rikku was a people person. Someone could shout ethnic slurs at her and she’d merely bounce and yell some back while smiling.

  
No one had ever told any of them this. The ones who didn’t like Yuna either kept well away or were already dead. The ones who didn’t like Paine, she ignored. The ones who didn’t like Rikku, she merely said ‘Okay,’ to and nothing was ever accomplished.

  
On the airship, two people ignored the problem, two more considered it, while one actually thought about it until she fell asleep dreaming about it.

…………..

‘People-or-not-people-persons’ were not what was occupying Seymour’s mind. In fact, what was occupying Seymour’s mind was fleeing from what else was occupying his mind.

  
No one gave him instructions on how to rule or be Maester, but he’d gotten the hang of it. But there was some fine print in being the son of the ruler of Guadosalam no one had ever pointed out to him.

  
As easy as ‘What he does no know will not hurt him,’ seems, in the end, someone has slept with at least one relative, someone’s eyes are missing and the survivors—if there are any—are standing amongst rubble and possibly corpses with only ‘oops’ to say about it.

  
And then there seems to be the universal habit of people trodding on the fabric of reality until it breaks and then everyone stands in a circle and points to the left when asked whose fault it was.

  
Seymour had at one point in time noticed that general consensus said it was his fault, no matter what happened, but at the moment he didn’t care.

  
There were a great many flaws in the farplane. The first was that everyone went to the same place. Someone infamous for murdering people because he felt like it would have a great time, while everyone else wouldn’t.

  
The second flaw was that you didn’t die. You were already dead. Said infamous murderer would have an even better time.

  
Then there was who was chosen to keep the farplane nice and tidy and happy and well… landscapy.

  
At first, he disliked his lot in life. Later, he disliked his lot in the afterlife. Then he pretty much settled on any form of existing he did sucked majorly.

  
Especially now that the general form of the farplane had gone from ugly to downright unfriendly. The farplane was the only known place in Spira where the landscape actually got up and bit you and chased you if you ran away. And it wasn’t very known.

  
The only comfort Seymour got—the only time he got was pseudo-awakening on the farplane after something pseudo-killed him, only for him to be pseudo-alive- was that wherever he was, there was no one else to give them a piece of their mind about what his had done to the place.

……………

The saying ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is slightly off. It implies one can choose to walk down the road, and even turn around and go the other way at the smell of brimstone.

  
In fact, the gate holding back hell is knocked down by good intentions. All hell breaks loose right on top of you and you can’t tell demons to go away or that they have the wrong address. And there’s no warning.

  
Hell is nature’s latest natural disasters. The world had no problems with it before people tried to play ethics with house rules. Like tidal waves, freak storms, and volcanoes, there was always warning that it would happen. People knew society was due for a backlash, or that the mountain was about to spew molten rock everywhere. The problem was the times of the disaster were only ‘very soon’ or ‘just now’ with nothing in between. You could get out of the way, or sit back and wait for something to hit you in the head and complain about it later. Either way, it still did damage.

  
Common sense is not integrated in any part of real education. Some people learn it, but to most the fact that playing around with the world’s metaphysics is not a good idea is never grasped. Plus, there’s always some charismatic idiot or two who says ‘sweep it under the rug, the cops never look there for disembodied heads,’ and somehow it seems so convenient that everyone agrees.

  
Right now there is a huge corpse barely even constituting as ‘under’ the most poorly built rug ever made and the walls of hell haven’t just opened, but fallen off their hinges. All metaphorically, of course.

  
What was really happening was a freak thunderstorm with no rain. The impressive part was not that it was eight times bigger than anything in recorded history, but the fact that it was coming out of the farplane. The lighting was the equivalent to normal lightning as a large gun being fired is to throwing a poorly made paper airplane.

  
Suddenly common sense kicked in and the residents fled. No one really paid attention to minor details, such as fire, which was blue, the fact that the portal to the farplane had grown black, but was getting bigger while the edges were not merely growing fuzzy, but unraveling like cheap fake silk.

  
Sometimes nature is gradual, making glaciers, eroding cliffs, and making beaches. Sometimes it waits and waits as you poison it and then it vomits all over you. The same works with magic, and the Guado had been feeding the farplane two generations of bad cheese.

…………..

A siren—or whatever the beeping flashing thing was—was going off. It didn’t seem to be in favor of stopping.

  
“You get up,” Paine said.

  
“Don’ wanna get up,” Rikku muttered.

  
“I’m not getting up, I already got up yesterday,” Yuna said.

  
Disasters have an inconvenient way of being inconvenient. This is why there aren’t that many heroes. There’s a difference between fighting a fire, and fighting a fire when you’re amazingly flammable, several miles from any water source, and a monster is trying to eat you.

  
At the moment it was four-something in the morning. It was a time when numbers shouldn’t be significant.

  
“Make it stop,” Paine muttered.

  
“You make it stop,” Yuna said.

  
“I’m not getting up,” Paine said.

  
“ZZZ,” came from Rikku.

…………………

Soon annoyance proved a more powerful force than anything, and everyone was on the bridge, in their pajamas, and yawning. Buddy kept falling asleep and banging his head on the console. After a while he gave up and woke up later with button-prints all over his face.

 

  
“What’s going on?” Yuna asked, then yawned.  
“We’ve got reports that Guadosalam just exploded,” Shinra said.

  
“Okay,” Rikku said, as Paine shoved her off her shoulder. At three in the morning, you’ll believe nearly anything. This was an hour later and the time when you’d believe anything at all.

  
“What do the people in Guadosalam say?” Paine asked.

  
“Nothing, the comsphere exploded,” Shinra said.

  
“Looks like an open and shut case,” Paine said.

  
There was a long pause. Brother’s head hit the console for the last time. Buddy put a lot of effort into along blink. Rikku fell asleep on her feet and Paine shook her awake.

  
Cognition finally finished in Yuna’s brain. “Should it have exploded?”

  
“I don’t think so…” Shinra said.

  
“Why’d it have to explode now?” Rikku asked.

  
“Don’t you mean ‘Why’d it explode in the first place?’” Paine asked.

  
“I dunno,” Rikku said.

  
“Any survivors?” Yuna asked.

  
“I don’t know,” Shinra answered. “The place still seems to be on fire.”

  
“The whole place?” Yuna asked.

  
“Whole thing,” Buddy said.

“That means we can’t do anything at the moment,” Paine said, and lazily wandered off to bed.

  
“I guess she’s right,” Yuna said. “We’ll have to wait until the flames die down.” She left for her bed as well.

  
Rikku passed out in the middle of the floor.

  
“Yes, but… Why did it explode?” Buddy asked to no one in general.

  
Brother’s face hit the windshield wiper button.


	3. Chapter 3

It was later in the day that they all returned to the disaster, which hadn’t stopped being a disaster. The blue flames had died away, and at least a few reports of survivors were confirmed.

  
Nothing was actually decidedly better.

  
The Gullwings had to trek towards Guadosalam from the river, but didn’t manage to get anywhere near the heart of where the city used to be.

  
The landscape had turned dark. The sky disappeared into blackness, as did most of the landscape. Rocks and plants took on a strange solidified-metaphorical look to them; they were almost positive they had wandered into a realm where yellow had a sound and music had smell. They didn’t venture very far into the strange place. Although the shadows seemed as solid as rocks, there was the undeniable glint of large teeth coming from them.  
“Hello?” Yuna called out.

  
Something growled so loud and yet so low that it wasn’t sound anymore; it was an earthquake.

  
“This might be that ‘complicated but important guado magic’ you mentioned?” Paine asked.

  
“That’s a good guess,” Yuna said.

  
“Yunie…” Rikku said in a scared voice. Yuna and Paine turned to see what it was all about.

  
There were footprints, huge and vaguely like those of someone’s boots in the dark ground. They led out of the darkness and into normality, then they disappeared.

  
“So…” Paine started. “Where’s he gonna sleep?”

…………………

Yuna was suddenly annoyed. At least, exponentially more annoyed than before. Somehow, in her logic, being the twice-sole savior of the farplane justified it as hers. It wasn’t as she’d left it.

  
The flowers were old and brown and overall dead. Things didn’t die in the farplane. They didn’t because… because… because she said so. So there.

  
She looked around. There was no portal to more farplane. There was no anything else. She was standing in nothingness… maybe. It was dark nothingness. Either that or it was just nothing and it was dark. Metaphors aren’t easy on the eyes.

  
“Hello?” she asked.

  
Some sort of solid blackness rushed her and she was knocked over. She shot at it once and it left, seemingly more out of disinterest than anything else. If darkness had the ability to regard something, this darkness regarded her in the same way a cat regards a carrot.

  
Something showed up. It looked like a bad watercolor. It had no distinctive shape, just a lot of verticality. Parts were bluish, parts were white, some part was black, but not as black as the rest of the place, and somewhere in it had a color that could be described as ‘pale flesh.’ This was all if you squinted hard enough.

  
“Who are you?”

  
“The fayth,” it whispered, with some effort.

  
“Um,” Yuna said. “About that thing you asked me to do…”

  
“We are all losing power,” the fayth said.

  
“Yeah, um… if it’ll fix all this… and the things with the teeth…I can… um… I can try.”

  
“This world… depends on his mind…” The fayth said. “Make him happy.”

  
Make some guy who vilified parenthood and idolized Sin happy. Sure. No problem. Oh, and don’t blow up the world… anymore than it already is. Yeah.. that would be easy.

  
“Is there any other—“

  
“…No…”

  
“Okay… I guess,” Yuna said. When life gave you lemons, you made lemonade. Suddenly that adage stopped working. Squish Sin, good. Squish fiend, good. Squish Vegnagun, good. Now the lemon life—or not life—that was giving her was Seymour. ‘I guess I’ll think of something’ she decided.

  
“Go back to where it all started,” the fayth said. It seemed to be losing what solidity it already had. “For him.”

  
“…Okay…” Yuna said. She was about to continue, to ask for clues or a hint or even directions, but the fayth was gone. It made no sign of being about to return.

  
Still, what could possibly go wrong?

…………………………

There was more running. It was almost always running. In life you had the option to turn around and say ‘Oh yeah?’ or ‘Fine, finish it and see if I care!’

  
This wasn’t life. This was an existing un-life. This was where, just because it was ‘game over’ it was also ‘restart.’ Saying ‘Oh, yeah?’ got you eaten or impaled or flayed, or whatever means the metaphor-come-to-life demons does to kill you. Then you get up and his buddy appears and says he knows what you said and doesn’t think it’s very nice. If you said ‘See if I care,’ they did. They often saw to it that you DID care, also. They saw to it that you cared a lot very unhappily. And if you didn’t care, that just made them madder, but had no real difference in end result.

  
Seymour was tired of dying…un-dying…whatever it was. All he wanted was to shout at his own mind ‘Go away’ with some expletives added and have it listen—and especially obey.

  
This wasn’t even real life. In real life sometimes you turned around and even though you got punched and even if you lost, the important thing was that you got some of your own punches in.

  
Demons, being metaphors, are rather unpunchable. You can’t even say ‘I’m not afraid of you!’ because they get mad and make you afraid of them again.

  
So here he was… wherever here was. The problem with infinity was that you can easily get lost in it. The landscape hand been changing so much he wasn’t even sure if he restarted in the same place.

  
It hadn’t always been like this. It had been trashed when his father was alive, and he’d coincidentally did his best to keep it good, but then he’d died at the hands of some pretty smiling person he thought would be his friend and the farplane lost it’s gleam, it’s shine, it’s sparkle, and replaced them with mud, pointy and hard rocks, bits of fire, and monsters. After slow magical erosion, the whole metaphorical cliff fell on him, not without turning into monsters first.

  
He considered the whole place a nightmare and since the farplane was indeed where dreams were made real, it was true.

  
He was running. He kept running. He’d long ago ran out of seeing any point to ‘Oh, yeah?’s and attempts at ‘Go the fuck away!’s.

  
He was running away—

  
\--And then suddenly he was running towards. He skidded to a stop. The place was familiar, but the farplane took on a more… ‘evil’ décor than emulating a flashback. It was colder here. In fact, it was freezing, probably literally. On occasion he could see his breath. The place was made of stone, a mix of actually built stonework, and just fallen down rubble. It was dark. It was damp.

  
He heard a slight slithery-scraping noise, not one metaphors make. He turned around. Before he could blink, the giant lizard leapt at him.

…………………

It took nearly an entire day, fighting monsters that weren’t solid, fiends that had grown not only to giant size but also some extra spikes and even heads.  
All the while, they kept trying to find the place where ‘it all started for him.’

  
It wasn’t Guadosalam, because there wasn’t anything left of that. Even though they had been there to defeat monsters, it wasn’t Beseid or Kilika. It turned out not to be Luca, although the stadium was now a pile of rubble. It wasn’t Macalania, because that had sunk. Bevelle hadn’t seen him, and the populace was busy arming themselves against creatures, or whatevers, from the Not-So-Farplane.

  
They checked outposts, temples, ruins, and roads. There was no sign of him. Yuna remembered when that was a good thing.

  
“Damn!” Yuna swore. “Where the fuck did it all start?”

  
“And what’s ‘it?’” Rikku asked.

  
“Yeah, those monsters and near-death experiences were just side notes to this story, huh?” Paine muttered.

  
“Why doesn’t anyone tell me these things?” Yuna said.

  
“What, giving you all the information so you don’t have to work at it, or not to kill people that might have mystical importance to the world?” Paine asked.

  
“Yeah,” Yuna said.

  
“His mom’s a fayth, right?” Paine asked.

  
“Either that or some fayth is off their rocker and really likes him,” Yuna said.

  
“Then there’s a temple to her, right?” Paine asked.

  
“I guess so,” Yuna said.

  
Rikku, shrugged. To her, anything beyond ‘the farplane is there’ was ignored. She was agnostic, which meant you knew there were powerful beings, but you didn’t have to care.

  
“So where is it?” Paine asked. She had been a reporter, not a summoner. Aeon stuff was Yuna’s area of expertise… hopefully.

  
“I don’t know,” Yuna said. “I never met her.”

  
“You skipped a temple?” Paine asked.

  
“Not to my knowledge,” Yuna said. Now she was confused. She never thought about it. A temple was a huge, great, looming thing. And a fayth… how the heck could you miscount fayth?

  
“You mean, there’s a temple out there that I—everyone missed?”

  
“Well, no one used it a generation ago because it wasn’t there,” Paine said.

  
Rikku, who had let the conversation fly over her head like fast weather, suddenly stopped in mid-bounce, which nearly caused her to fall over.

  
“Can it be a broken temple?” she asked.

  
Suddenly everyone on the airship was looking at her.

  
“What?” she asked.


End file.
